Dragon Age: Inquisition is now content complete, and well on the road to Alpha. The news of this development comes from the game’s Lead Writer, David Gaider’s personal blog, where he announced that the game is basically done in terms of content.
He notes that the game is at a point where it’s more about dealing with the content they have and getting it all to work, and it’s the stage where most of the big cuts happen, since the developers can still create new content to deal with those cuts—such as changes to the game’s writing to improve the flow of its story.
“Once we hit Alpha, cuts are generally things that are simply excised in their entirety, without any ability to really work around them for the sake of logic or flow,” wrote Gaider.
It’s interesting that the developers at BioWare choose to see Alpha as a content complete stage, especially since so many Steam Early Access Alphas and Betas could be classified as “hardly done” and certainly bereft of content. It’s interesting to see how a triple A studio like BioWare deals with the terminology.
“The writing team is mostly out of the pool insofar as voiced dialogue goes, so the last of it can go through the pipeline and get edited, recorded and localized before being passed on to the cinematics people. At this point we’re mostly working on what we call “non-VO text” …the codex entries, item and talent descriptions, GUI text,” he continued. “Pretty much anything that needs words.”
Gaider noted that the studio’s writers will still have to handle with all the various bugs and be responsive to any cuts that are occurring.
“This is a pretty stressful time for everyone,” wrote Gaider. “Every cut feels like it’s reducing the overall quality of the game, until there are so many of them you feel like you’re producing a piece of crap—until you remind yourself that every game goes through this, and the alternative is shipping late or not at all.
“It’s not a process that any fan will truly understand. They’re usually oblivious to what’s going on, harping on what color the sails should be while the hull is rapidly leaking water. Which is a strange dissonance from our perspective, let me tell you.”
In related news, the Twitter account of voice actor Greg Ellis notes that he is performing a song as Cullen, one of the game’s main characters and holdover from the previous Dragon Age titles. We’ll just have to wait and see (or listen).
